Tel Aviv MuseuM of Art, isr ael

The open MuseuM, Tefen, isr ael

M Ass MoC A , us A

THE WANDERING VEIL IZHAR PATKIN

this catalog is published on the occasion of the traveling exhibition Izhar Patkin: The Wandering Veil.

Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Pavilion, June 2012

acting Director: Shuli Kislev

Curator: Ellen Ginton

associate Curator: anat Danon-Sivan

registrars: Shraga Edelsburg, alisa Friedman-Padovano, Shoshana Frankel

Conservators: Dr. Doron J. Lurie, Maya Dresner, Hasia rimon, Noga Schusterman, Klara Karlova

Lighting: Naor agayan, Lior Gabai, asaf Menachem, Haim Beracha

Installation Production: tucan Ltd.

The Open Museum, Tefen Industrial Park, June 2012

Curator: ruthi Ofek

assistants to the Curator: Dana Gross, Yasimin Kunz

registrar: rachel Lazar

Installation: Sami Sisso, Issac Elmakias

Public relations & Communication: Yael Shavit

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013

Director: Joseph thompson

assistant to the Director: Paulette Wein

Director of Exhibition Planning: Dante Birch

Director of Information technology: John Mcalister

Director of Fabrication and art Installation: richard Criddle

Operations Manager: art McConnell

Catalog

Design: Kristin Johnson

Production: Kfir Malka

Photography: Mary Bachmann, Paula Court, D. James Dee, avraham Hay, David Heald, David Horowitz, Yasimin Kunz, robert McKeever, Helaine Messer,

Michael James O’Brien, Gene Ogami, Phillips / Schwab, adam reich, ringling Museum of art, Sèvres—Cité de la céramique / Gérard Jonca, Christian Schwager,

Jan Silberstein, Stedelijk Museum, Fernando torre, Peter Christiansen Valli, Whitney Museum of american art, Ellen Page Wilson

Hebrew text editing: Orna Yehudaioff

translation: Einat adi

English editing: Kristin Jones, ariana reines

Printing: a. r. Printing Ltd.

Great Curtains I Have Known / Interview with Izhar Patkin, Herbert Muschamp, Stedelijk Museum catalog © 1990 by the Estate of Herbert Muschamp.

the Veiled Suite: the Collected Poems. agha Shahid ali. © 2009 by the agha Shahid ali Literary Estate / W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

the rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems. Faiz ahmed Faiz, agha Shahid ali. © 1991 by the agha Shahid ali Literary Estate / the University of Massachusetts Press.

the exhibition and catalog have been made possible thanks to the generous support of:

artIS, BFaMI / British Friends of the art Museums of Israel, Wendy Fisher, Jacob Lee, anne Marie MacDonald,

Suzy and Elihu rose, David ross, rivka Saker and Uzi Zucker, Ellen and Harvey Sanders, Dafna Schmerin, Irit Strauss,

Marie-Claude Stobart, Blancpain art Contemporain, the Centre International de recherche sur le Verre et les arts Plastiques (CIrVa),

the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, and to all the individuals and institutions that lent works to the exhibition.

Measurements are given in inches and centimeters, height x width.

On the covers: Madonna and Child (detail), 2007–12, Sèvres porcelain, pâte nouvelle, 89 3/8 x 31 1/5 x 31 1/5" (227 x 80 x 80 cm)

© 2012, tel aviv Museum of art, Open Museum, MaSS MoCa

all works of art by Izhar Patkin are © by Izhar Patkin.

all rights reserved.

2012, tel aviv Museum of art, cat. 5/12.

ISBN 978-965-539-048-3

Printed in Israel

Contents

Foreword Ellen Ginton

Ruthi OfekJoseph Thompson

The Name and the Father

the Wandering VeilIzhar Patkin and David Ross in conversation

Pictures Are Nets

the Ghost Essay Shimon Adaf

ViolinsPoem by Mahmoud Darwish: Version by Agha Shahid Ali (with Ahmad Dallal)

the Veiled SuitePoem by Agha Shahid Ali

Endangered Species

Madonna and Child in Seven VeilsShlomzion Kenan

A Complicated Landscape

You Tell Us What to DoPoem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Version by Agha Shahid Ali

the Messiah’s assSefi Rachlevsky

Et in arcadia Ego: a tale of History and LandscapeRuthi Ofek

the Dream CorpsItamar Levy

Where Each Is Both

the Dead are Here. Listen to the SurvivorsAgha Shahid Ali

EveningPoem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz: Version by Agha Shahid Ali

Black Shadows White Ghosts

God at Breakfast, Fallen angels Over toast at LunchHerbert Muschamp

Great Curtains I Have KnownHerbert Muschamp

a Surreal Encounter: Izhar Patkin, arie aroch, and Marcel DuchampEllen Ginton

List of Works

Selected Monographs & Catalogs

acknowledgments

about the Poets & authors

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64

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80

107

108

122

128

136

151

152

174

203

204

210

226

234

237

238

239

this catalog is published on the occasion of the traveling exhibition Izhar Patkin: The Wandering Veil.

Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Pavilion, June 2012

acting Director: Shuli Kislev

Curator: Ellen Ginton

associate Curator: anat Danon-Sivan

registrars: Shraga Edelsburg, alisa Friedman-Padovano, Shoshana Frankel

Conservators: Dr. Doron J. Lurie, Maya Dresner, Hasia rimon, Noga Schusterman, Klara Karlova

Lighting: Naor agayan, Lior Gabai, asaf Menachem, Haim Beracha

Installation Production: tucan Ltd.

The Open Museum, Tefen Industrial Park, June 2012

Curator: ruthi Ofek

assistants to the Curator: Dana Gross, Yasimin Kunz

registrar: rachel Lazar

Installation: Sami Sisso, Issac Elmakias

Public relations & Communication: Yael Shavit

Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, 2013

Director: Joseph thompson

assistant to the Director: Paulette Wein

Director of Exhibition Planning: Dante Birch

Director of Information technology: John Mcalister

Director of Fabrication and art Installation: richard Criddle

Operations Manager: art McConnell

Catalog

Design: Kristin Johnson

Production: Kfir Malka

Photography: Mary Bachmann, Paula Court, D. James Dee, avraham Hay, David Heald, David Horowitz, Yasimin Kunz, robert McKeever, Helaine Messer,

Michael James O’Brien, Gene Ogami, Phillips / Schwab, adam reich, ringling Museum of art, Sèvres—Cité de la céramique / Gérard Jonca, Christian Schwager,

Jan Silberstein, Stedelijk Museum, Fernando torre, Peter Christiansen Valli, Whitney Museum of american art, Ellen Page Wilson

Hebrew text editing: Orna Yehudaioff

translation: Einat adi

English editing: Kristin Jones, ariana reines

Printing: a. r. Printing Ltd.

Great Curtains I Have Known / Interview with Izhar Patkin, Herbert Muschamp, Stedelijk Museum catalog © 1990 by the Estate of Herbert Muschamp.

the Veiled Suite: the Collected Poems. agha Shahid ali. © 2009 by the agha Shahid ali Literary Estate / W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

the rebel’s Silhouette: Selected Poems. Faiz ahmed Faiz, agha Shahid ali. © 1991 by the agha Shahid ali Literary Estate / the University of Massachusetts Press.

the exhibition and catalog have been made possible thanks to the generous support of:

artIS, BFaMI / British Friends of the art Museums of Israel, Wendy Fisher, Jacob Lee, anne Marie MacDonald,

Suzy and Elihu rose, David ross, rivka Saker and Uzi Zucker, Ellen and Harvey Sanders, Dafna Schmerin, Irit Strauss,

Marie-Claude Stobart, Blancpain art Contemporain, the Centre International de recherche sur le Verre et les arts Plastiques (CIrVa),

the Manufacture nationale de Sèvres, and to all the individuals and institutions that lent works to the exhibition.

Measurements are given in inches and centimeters, height x width.

On the covers: Madonna and Child (detail), 2007–12, Sèvres porcelain, pâte nouvelle, 89 3/8 x 31 1/5 x 31 1/5" (227 x 80 x 80 cm)

© 2012, tel aviv Museum of art, Open Museum, MaSS MoCa

all works of art by Izhar Patkin are © by Izhar Patkin.

all rights reserved.

2012, tel aviv Museum of art, cat. 5/12.

ISBN 978-965-539-048-3

Printed in Israel

6

To the living and to the dead,

with apologies to anyone I may have left out

7

Foreword

Working on “Izhar Patkin: The Wandering Veil” has been a genuine pleasure for us, and we are delighted that it will be seen in three museums and on two continents.

More than two decades ago, Ellen Ginton suggested mounting a comprehensive survey of Patkin’s work for the Tel Aviv Museum of Art. The late Mordechai (Moti) Omer nurtured the idea, bringing it to its current ambitious scale. Ruthi Ofek proposed that the exhibition be further expanded to include The Open Museum, Tefen Industrial Park, in northern Israel. Joseph Thompson, at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in the United States, has turned the collaboration into an international one.

This survey is organized thematically rather than chronologically, focusing on the last decade but also including groundbreaking earlier works. Patkin was born in Israel in 1955, and he lives and works in New York City. Key to his vision is the confluence of themes from his homeland with narratives of global cultural migration. “The Wandering Veil” encompasses his life as well as the mercurial nature of his objects. Patkin’s unique visual vocabulary defies categorization: in his work, theme invents technique and vice versa, casting the objects he creates in a continuous theater of becoming.

Since his 1981 debut show of “invented” reproductions at the Kitchen in New York, Patkin has continued to challenge himself and us with his conundrums. These have included the marriage of metaphor and identity in his “Meta Bride” exhibition at the Holly Solomon Gallery in 1983; his presentation of a Genet play as a painting on black rubber curtains at the 1987 Whitney Biennial; and Don Quijote Segunda Parte, in which fiction gazes at reality, shown at the 1990 Venice Biennale. In the 1990 Stedelijk Museum survey show “Four-Piece Suit,” his inventive “reverse” paintings were exhibited alongside Presidential Wax, a series of large-scale photocollages that Patkin perforated to achieve an illusive veil-like presence.

Patkin’s work has been collected in depth by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art; The Open Museum, Tefen; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and many other prominent institutions. An essential supplement to “Izhar Patkin: The Wandering Veil,” the essays, conversations, and poetry included in this book—by scholars, curators, writers, and poets—reflect his work’s scope and complexity, as well as its

absorbing and original vision.

Ellen Ginton Tel Aviv Museum of Art

ruthi Ofek The Open Museum, Tefen

Joseph thompson Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art

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IzhAR PATkIN ANd dAVId ROSS IN CONVERSATION, FEBRuARy 2012, NEW yORk CITy

dAVId ROSS: Let’s begin with the early works in the exhibition. In looking at My Promise

Can’t Be Broken (1981; page 28), it becomes clear that your concern with notions of

the performative is not necessarily with performance, but with the implications of narrative

and storytelling. It seems to me that the performative lies beneath these early works and

continues throughout your career.

IzhAR PATkIN: Cinema and Duchamp changed everything in painting. They both threw the

canvas into a state of anxiety (see Ellen Ginton’s essay on theatricality in Patkin’s work on

page 226). When I went to school, Super-8 films, performance art, and the documentation

of performance were a door out of the canvas ghetto. That door was very seductive. Today

it’s video, but I’m still in love with the promise of painting, and its object.

dR: In My Promise Can’t Be Broken, the curtain opens up to reveal no painting—just the wall,

just the stretcher.

IP: I painted it for my first solo show at the Holly Solomon Gallery, and I was questioning the

promise of painting itself. In the context of that show, which was titled “The Meta Bride,”

this declaration was seen as both a wedding promise and an audacious statement by a young

painter. My Promise Can’t Be Broken is a rubber curtain framed under Plexiglas, but the viewer

can physically draw the curtain open with a set of magnets.

dR: So you made the canvas accessible. The painting can be opened and closed through

the glass, and you see the wall. But that is sort of a letdown. Or are you saying that there is

no painting?

IP: This framed curtain/canvas may be on the verge of disappearance, but it is a painting.

However, the promise of my veil paintings is neither the metaphor of the window nor that

of the wall. Modernism tried to do away with the promise of the narrative window. All you

were left with was the image of the wall, a white on white.

dR: Or the ghost, which is prevalent as metaphor and motif throughout the body of work in

this exhibition.

IP: The first painting I remember seeing when I was growing up was a posthumous portrait of

my uncle Izhar Patkin, whom I am named after. My grandmother commissioned this portrait

after he was killed in the military. It was a painting of a ghost, and it was my namesake.

The Wandering Veil

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dR: Naming is the first act of creation.

IP: Your name is your first ghost, a profound encounter. I was born soon after my eighteen-

year-old uncle was killed. The family’s pain was so deep they could not even utter his/my

name. I was de facto nameless until the age of three.

dR: You have made a ghost painting of that picture.

IP: Yes, and I am planning to open this survey show with it.

dR: Is that a sentimental gesture, or are you announcing an aspect of your relationship to

the past?

IP: It announces history, and it announces the first wound. But not only mine. Think of

all those who die on both sides of any conflict. How many generations later will their heirs

still carry those ghosts? A ghost is essentially an unresolved or suspended emotion. It is

not an abstraction or a representation of an emotion. It is a manifestation that questions

its own presence. Later in life, I understood that the role of the artist as a narrator is to

suspend ghosts.

dR: An artist once told me that all work is self-portraiture. You started out with a number of

literal self-portraits, such as Ghost Chair (1978; page 31), with you in the chair.

IP: Yes, that work is from my last year of art school, and I know it’s a little silly to put that in

a show as an adult. But there is an important seed in this drawing. It’s a photograph of me

dressed in black, sitting on a white chair. I drew the chair over my body with a white pencil,

turning both the chair and me into ghosts. This was a harbinger of things to come with the

translucencies. The chair looks a bit like a veil.

dR: Do you believe that everything you do reveals your intentions?

IP: You are simultaneously unveiling yourself and weaving your veil, the tissue of your text,

as Barthes would say.

dR: Tell me about the Samaritana (1980–81; page 33) curtain. Was this self-portrait your

first painting on pleated curtains?

IP: Yes. It is painted in a preposterous utopian Russian Constructivist posture, complete with

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the red satin banner on the side! I sprayed my portrait with stencils on black rubber. A

blurred line that cuts through the top of my head could be both a landscape and a vision.

On the bottom it says “Samaritana,” as in one responsible Good Samaritan.

dR: But you have now re-created an exhibition copy without the text of thirty years ago.

Why did you delete the subtitle of the original painting, with its idealistic description? Is

diminished idealism what happens to all of us?

IP: The process of “un-indoctrinating” oneself is never-ending. It’s essential for anyone who

wants to be a serious originator of ideas.

dR: I have always thought that artists should create self-portraits periodically, throughout

their lives, so that they can measure their sense of self, of self-worth or self-loathing.

IP: One of my favorite lines of Borges is from Dreamtigers: “A man sets himself the task

of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images of provinces . . .

rooms . . . instruments, stars, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that that

patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his face.” 1

dR: But in all good stories, the hero goes on a journey of self-discovery.

IP: Yes. Character development is the most complex aspect of any narrative.

dR: Do you feel that you have become less idealistic?

IP: Not at all. When I paint, I am just as innocent as ever. I am not letting go of that.

What’s the point of making art without it? I have faith in mystery.

dR: The themes and ideas of any serious artist are born early and become more refined

throughout their careers. In your early perforated-photographic works, you invented

collages of continuous morphing visual images. They were also organized as an

architectural construct, which eventually became your veil rooms.

IP: What everyone does with Photoshop today, which is morph one image into another,

I did back then in handmade physical collage (Untitled, 1980–81: pages 34–35). There was

no digital morphing. Those early collage works were a harbinger on many fronts.

dR: There is more to your interest in using morphing technology, which of course you use in

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the creation of the images for the veil rooms. You invented an architecture for your circular

narratives, one that can be entered into and walked through, where there is no beginning

and no end.

IP: When does any story start? 1948? 1967? 0? There is a narrative of a god who started

it all, but even he molded it out of preexisting chaos. For the artist, one story flows

into another in a constant performance of creation. My glass sculpture of Shiva, the dancer

and the seducer, is about this state of endless creation. Any statue of Shiva is Shiva.

In other words, it is a manifestation, not a mere representation. This was a departure

from my Judeo-Christian culture, closing the distance between the artist and the object

and its meaning. I combined my Shiva with two other legendary creative dancers,

Carmen Miranda and Josephine Baker, both famous exiles. And I made him leap out

of a circle of roses, a Garden of Eden I suppose, as a self-exile. That sculpture is called

Where Each Is Both (1994; pages 200–201). In exile, the story of one culture merges

into another.

dR: Can you talk about the idea of exile in your work? You chose to move to New York, and

you are hardly a political exile or refugee.

IP: The exilic voice is the dissenting voice. You don’t even have to travel. As the

Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali put it: “When I write in English I am in exile

in my own language.” The perspective of comparative religion, culture, and literature is

intrinsic to the exilic state of mind.

dR: But you are not sentimental when you talk about exile.

IP: Not in the banal sense. Shahid always said that what we call sentimental in the West is

called “loss” in the East.

dR: You’re not being nostalgic?

IP: Nostalgia derives from Greek words meaning homecoming plus pain. In that sense, one

can also be nostalgic for a new home, not just the return of the familiar. Home can be a new

painting. I really don’t like the monopoly that Jewish culture thinks it has over the notion

of homecoming and the diaspora. In today’s global reality, every motherland has a great

diaspora, often in America. The relationship between all motherlands and their diasporas

is one of the most fantastic and progressive gifts any country could wish for. It’s the

internal-eye’s view, but from the outside.

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dR: Your work moves freely between the extremely personal and private to the global, as in

the marvelous portrait of your late father. You painted him on the tulle veil from a tourist

snapshot taken in front of the World Trade Center years before 9/11 (pages 38–41). It’s

a magical picture, not only because you are remembering your father, but also because

something else is happening.

IP: This is a painting of two ghosts, my personal one and the public one. And although I am

always reluctant to get too personal in terms of biography, it surfaces one way or another.

But the introduction of an autobiographical element is also a device. It’s a lure that

turns the passive viewer into a hunter. Or as the Indian author Gita Mehta told me, “into

a stalker, which is even better!” After all, we are in the business of visual seduction.

dR: On a metaphorical level, what does your father’s portrait represent? Your show deals

with such large themes of life and death, transformation, and the ghost of the absent or

the present.

IP: It’s not up to me to assign to any painting a particular reductive meaning. I am the

author, not the destination. Does the viewer really need to know that my father passed

away soon after the World Trade Center fell?

dR: But it’s not meaningless for the viewer to see this man sitting on a bench, which seems

to be floating in the air in front of a building that only exists in our memory. That has

broader implications.

IP: I want the tulle veils to physically take you into another world of memories, to question

the how and the extent to which things exist. I have always believed that even the most

abstract thought needs an object to exist. Words are objects. Even the nameless god needed

the word. For example, there is an early piece called You Can’t Escape the Body (1981; page 11).

One of things I always ask myself is how much body a work of art really needs to exist

and to convey its plot. I think the tulle veil paintings are the climax of that dilemma. Not

only are they translucent and ephemeral, but the netting physically resists the registration

of the image. The images and metaphors aren’t passive; they are active. There is a game

of hide and seek on the tulle pleats. The viewer has to be very active to hunt down the

phantom images. They are there and not there at the same time. The images are always

fleeting, like thoughts looking for their bodies, in search of their manifestations.

dR: The images on the veil paintings are fugitive, floating somewhere between printmaking,

photography, and painting.

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IP: The painted veils may seem unorthodox, but they are unwaveringly paintings because they

have the logic, intention, and concerns of a painter. I employ digital printing just as Johns

and Warhol used the stencil and the silkscreen. In my “reverse” screen paintings with the

carpet motifs, Gardens for the Global City (1991–present; pages 142–49), I don’t use a brush

either. Yet there is so much hand in those paintings, as I physically push the oil paint from

the backside of the wire-mesh canvas to the front, that they are practically finger paintings.

Their paint has real meat.

dR: I like how the crude finger work takes on such an elegant presence because of the way

you express the raw oil paint through the mesh of the screens. I am not questioning the

painterliness of the veil paintings, but whether or not they also function as sculpture because

of their volume and the way that people experience them in space.

IP: The question of how much body a work needs to actually exist is inherent in both my

sculptures and my paintings. Everything I do is narrative-driven. The narrative determines

the body, and vice versa. As Wittgenstein said, “We cannot express through language

what expresses itself in language.” The material and the narrative are equal actors in the

construction of the plot. You can escape neither.

dR: You create new connections between media that were previously seen as distinct, almost like

an act of translation. In the poems of the legendary Kashmiri American Agha Shahid Ali, one can’t

help feeling the tension between the forms and the spaces that your work and your life occupy.

IP: With one word, the emperor’s translator could bring down the empire.

dR: The main project of this exhibition is your collaboration with Agha Shahid Ali, who

like many poets, was also a great translator. One of the early works in the project is Violins

(2006; pages 52–63), based on the poem “Violins,” which Ali translated, at the behest of

Edward Said, from the renowned Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish.

IP: Let’s use the word adapted.

dR: How do you define the difference between an adaptation and a translation?

IP: Well, in an adaptation you’re not translating verbatim—you’re reinventing the medium,

and you don’t pretend to be an invisible creator.

dR: Then would you say that your work in relationship to Ali’s work is an adaptation? Almost

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like a stage director reinterpreting a Shakespearean play?

IP: Absolutely. In fact, if we detour for a moment to literature, when you have to translate

a text from a classical language to English, you must adapt to a very different metaphorical

dial. English doesn’t tolerate the density of metaphors that classical languages thrive on.

Shahid dreamed in Indian classical languages and wrote in English. His “wandering”

poems became the text that I had to put into a third language—the painterly—without

using words at all. Each of the veil rooms is an adaptation of a different Shahid poem.

I had to invent a different time and place for each one, a stage on which to evoke and

visualize each poem. In Shahid’s adaptation of Darwish’s “Violins,” the sound of the word

violins morphs into violence. In my Violins room, I transformed the image of a cello recital

in the White House into a “theater of war.” I worked from a photograph of Pablo Casals’s

1961 performance in the East Room, where he is bowing to the audience. But I painted him

with his back to the president, the first lady, and their guests. They all face scenes of war—

armies, death, and fleeing refugees—an image that doesn’t appear in Darwish’s poem or

in Shahid’s adaptation. For me, the paradox of theater and war was a perfect way to

visualize the drama of two great poems.

dR: Digging deeper, one would recall Casals’s famous declaration, “My cello is my weapon.”

And then you painted pigeons on the White House ballroom floor to remind us of Casals’s

“Song of the Birds,” a traditional Catalan song that he routinely played to protest the

Franco dictatorship.

IP: Using images, like Casals, that are developed characters in themselves is a device that

helps me widen the scope of the narrative.

dR: It is quite a challenge to create a visual adaptation that’s not a literal translation

or illustration of a text, but, rather, a setting-off point for another level of metaphoric

interpretation. Great painters always do this. The way Masaccio used the Bible for his

painting of the exile made you look back at that text in a new way.

IP: I began working this way early on with The Black Paintings (1985–86; pages 212–17),

based on Jean Genet’s play The Blacks. It’s a play about race that I adapted into a room of

white images stenciled on black rubber curtains. Each wall became an act. I painted an

underworld palace in a nocturnal domain, complete with a lunar eclipse. The metaphors

I used for black were almost encyclopedic in scope.

dR: Why did you paint a white ghost among the blacks?

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IP: The play presented me with a visual impossibility. The plot has a murder that never

happened. Genet asks the blacks to pretend to kill a white prostitute. Imagine, if I had

painted a murder that never happened, it would have instantly become evidence of its

having happened. So how do you paint something that hasn’t happened or won’t happen?

My solution was to use a ghost as the murdered figure. You can’t kill a ghost, and it had to

be recognizable, so I had the black characters murder a white ghost in the guise of Manet’s

famous courtesan, Olympia. Like Casals, she functions as a meta-device.

dR: You were dealing with racial politics in an indirect way.

IP: But the metaphorical way is no less political. In The Meta Bride (1982; page 225), I painted

a black bride on a white tulle veil—a Snow White complex. We are all born into metaphors

that don’t fit us. The role of the artist is to reinvent them. Metaphor is the artist’s arena, my

theater of war.

dR: The collaboration with Agha Shahid Ali, who uses metaphor so richly, must have been

very appealing to you.

IP: The publisher Anne Marie MacDonald wanted us to do a book together. I was deeply

moved by Shahid and his writing, and we both decided that the Jew and the Muslim should

meet on the veil. I suggested that the veil be the meeting place, not something that veils. We

recognized that the exilic condition was a recurring motif in our vocabulary, since we both

lived away from our troubled birth cultures. Whatever was to come out of the collaboration,

we decided to call our project “Veiled Threats.” It was Ishmael and Isaac from the get-go.

Tragically, two years after we started working, he was diagnosed with brain cancer, and he

died very young. We were the best of friends.

dR: It’s a shame that he never lived to see any of your veil paintings completed. Did he

understand what you were going to do?

IP: He wrote the last poem expressly for our collaboration. It was his requiem and the

summation of his rich vocabulary. For months he called it “The Veil Suite,” evoking an

object, a place. But a few days before he died, he changed it to “The Veiled Suite.”

dR: “Veil” versus “veiled.”

IP: It was very perplexing for me, because as close friends, collaborators, and artists, we never

believed in anything that was veiled. I kept The Veil Suite as the title for my painting. “Make me

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now your veil, then see if you can veil yourself from me”—this line from the poem frames it all.

dR: The form of that last poem is very complex, especially for a man suffering the final

stages of brain cancer.

IP: He wrote it as a canzone. Dante was one of the inventors of the canzone in its classical

form, which is so structurally complex that nobody has ever written more than two. This

was Shahid’s third. He wrote it without any short-term memory, his vision so ravaged

by the cancer—it brings to mind Milton’s blindness. He wrote as beautifully as his beloved

Emily Dickinson. Both possessed an effervescent genius.

dR: This talk about the effervescent and the void brings me back to a motif that appears

throughout your work. It is the notion of the emptied center, the missing parts, the holes in

the mesh.

IP: In 1980 I started the Tatting series (pages 208–9) with the image of an empty armchair

set in a starry celestial landscape. An orphaned cupid, perched on the arm of the chair,

refers to the Modernist secular myth of the vacant seat of God. Was it ever occupied? Where

does meaning reside? What is the promise of a painting? Is it in the painting or is it in you?

Is the painting a manifestation of your desires, or is it a representation of something else?

Why is there a distance between the painting and the painter?

dR: Is this part of the Modernist concern with the death of the author?

IP: The death of God was one thing. But how the art world took the writings of Mallarmé,

Barthes, and Foucault about the death of the author to a cynical conclusion was tragic!

Art became a masquerade of appropriation and pastiche at the price of originality.

Shimon Adaf brilliantly proposes “the ghost story” (page 44) as an ideal “genre”

model for my work. He argues that if one sees Modernism’s dominant genre as the

detective story, which always starts with the corpse or missing body, and if one skips the

cynical era of picaresque post-Modernism, “the ghost story offers itself [for Patkin’s work]

as the best genre.”

For me, as a painter the real corpse in art after Modernism is neither God’s nor the

author’s. It is not the phantoms of extinct birds in my Sèvres plates and the eggcups that

I made as their tombstones, nor is it the hole I left in the Sèvres porcelain clock. It is the

body of painting itself. My childless porcelain Madonna and Child is a provocation, perhaps,

though not in her grasping a shroud of a missing god, but, rather, her holding out a fresh

start for the blank canvas, or at least what could be a new dress.

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But you asked about the death of the author. The voided center of authority is a

wonderfully complex narrative that was at the heart of Western Enlightenment. In Motl, Son

of Pesye the Cantor, a book I love by the great Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, there is chapter

that starts with “Hallelujah, I’m an orphan.” Motl, the orphan who journeys from the old

world to America, is too young to have been indoctrinated when his father dies. He dreams of

becoming a secular musician, but ends up as a cartoonist and a painter of graven images. You

could say that I took his story a step further when I made the Shiva, a god,

a dancer, a seducer.

dR: So the notion of the lack is not an issue of something negative or missing, but something

liberating?

IP: It’s the notion of potentiality. Shlomzion Kenan writes about it brilliantly in her essay on

the Madonna and Child (page 80).

dR: For you, potentiality goes beyond metaphor. It is more about the concept of manifestation.

IP: I wander among cultures. The chasm between abstraction, representation, and manifestation

is embodied in my story. I was born into a world with a Jewish abstract god. I live in the

iconic economy of Western Christian representation. And I acknowledge the great gods of

manifestation in the pagan religions of the East. Unfortunately or not, our secular language

is still anchored in religious vocabulary. This is true not just in art and literature, but also

in science. Even quantum physics names subatomic particles after mysterious gods. Freud

demystified hysteria and named his theories after pagan phenomena. Gershom Scholem said,

“The secularization of language 2 is only a façon de parler, a phrase! It is impossible to empty out

words that are filled to the breaking point with specific meanings lest it be done at the sacrifice

of the language itself!” 3 We can’t escape that language. But do we really need to? He also said

that the death of the name of God is the death of language. 4 The Jewish ban on graven images

that necessitated abstraction and repressed the mimetic drive is deep in my cultural background.

But the dilemma for me is: Why draw the line at images when words have a body, too? That’s

monotheism for you, the idolatry of language. No wonder Ezekiel eats the scroll . . .

dR: And representation?

IP: Representation is essentially Catholic. The icon was supposed to solve the problem of

idolatry because it’s only a representation, a substitution. But the paradox was that the Veil of

Veronica, in which God was made visible, even when multiplied as representations, is nothing

but the one Vera-Icona.

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dR: The only true image. The control of information as the birth of capitalism.

IP: As if this super-branding were not enough, the icon also offers salvation. What is a

painting supposed to offer? And which model is it supposed to follow? Where does the

meaning reside? Is it in the object? Is it the painting itself? Outside? Shimon Adaf elaborates

on this dilemma and the notion of “the veil principle” in his “Ghost Essay.”

dR: When did you start to negotiate this crisis?

IP: I remember going to Europe for the first time as a young boy. Visiting the big museums

with all the great religious paintings, I was perplexed. Were these museums or churches?

Later on, in art school, I was indoctrinated into the narrative of western art history and was

trained to see the universal value of those wonderful paintings.

dR: Now you are thinking, “universal values, not so fast”! You see how everything is still

anchored in religious ideologies.

IP: I was also indoctrinated into American popular culture. Secular capitalism holds the

same false promise of redemption as the icon. It’s not an invitation to a process of catharsis.

Today, globalism offers the redemption of the free market. But some cultures might

see it as an invasion of an iconic economy of false gods. And we know that the icon is

indeed the economy of the Christian church. This is how images in today’s global

culture become veiled threats. An artist in the age of globalism has to be in a constant

process of un-indoctrination. Western art is no less an invasion than McDonald’s

or Starbucks.

dR: And what would be a manifestation of hamburger?

IP: I hope more than a clown with a Quarter Pounder at the Golden Arches. I can always

offer you a word on a scroll . . . manifestation is something that comes from paganism,

where the gods are phenomena. Let’s say you were a follower of classical Greek religion and

you just displayed your little tchotchkes on the mantelpiece. Today, you would be described

as having good taste and a good design sense; the Greeks would say Zeus was at work,

because he is the god of good order.

dR: That’s interesting because it leads to how we imbue notions of character in things. For

instance, developing a character in a painting is very different than doing it in a play. How

do you evoke character without talk, sound, or subtitles?

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IP: When I look at a great Ingres portrait, I know what he thought about the women he

painted. He makes me think that I know who they were in their time. You can call them

figures of speech.

dR: So they function both metaphorically and metonymically? They make you feel that you

have possibly reached beyond representation.

IP: Every time I see his portraits, I say I never want to see another photograph in my life.

dR: Do you link the process of catharsis, perhaps as it was in classical Greek drama, to

character development?

IP: Yes, but not as an act of moral purification, and obviously it’s a different kind of dialogue.

However, in painting, as in literature and drama, character can be evoked by something

as simple as color, or the subversion of the expected. For example, there is an image of a

dress in my painting The Perfect Existence in the Rose Garden: Confirmation (1988; page 92). It’s

a red dress in the middle of a hortus conclusus with red roses, a medieval enclosed garden.

Traditionally, the virgin would be sitting inside protected by the thorns. In my painting

there is a red dress without the wearer. In another painting called Madonna and Child

(1998; page 93) I did some years later, she is wearing a red dress and the child is not there.

dR: And so the red dress itself is a character.

IP: The red dress and the color red are actors in the plots of both paintings. Every element

in the painting is a character in the narrative. I don’t have canvases that are meaninglessly

hidden under paint. If it’s painted on a screen, then the screen is a player. Gold leaf could be

a character just like the image of a dress. The redness itself is a character. Characters develop

between and within each painting. This happens in the tension between the material and

the image, the elements of surprise and discovery that change the course of the narrative.

The tension makes the metaphor active rather than descriptive. Everything in my work, like

in a dream, is a manifestation. I have a dream ensemble cast of characters!

dR: What about the significance of Felix Mendelssohn, or the Mendelssohns in general,

actual characters that appear in your Judenporzellan (1998–2002; pages 95–99)?

IP: I came upon a historical anecdote of ridiculous bureaucratic anti-Semitism, the story

of Judenporzellan. It was 1769 and the Jews of Berlin were forced to buy inferior-grade

porcelain from the king’s failing factory. One man humiliated by this scam was Moses

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Mendelssohn. He was a father of the Jewish enlightenment and the Enlightenment in

general, yet this great philosopher was forced to buy cheap porcelain monkeys. I cast him

and his family as an allegory for our time. Moses Mendelssohn was open-minded, he was

scholarly, he was liberal, and his thinking went beyond ghettoized doctrines. Importantly,

he was not messianic. I wanted to celebrate a hero who would stand in stark contrast to

the dangerous messianic tendencies that I see in Israel and around the world.

dR: But you chose to depict Felix Mendelssohn holding a Judenporzellan teapot, instead of

the top hat that he wore in real life when he met Queen Victoria.

IP: Felix inherited the porcelain from his legendary grandfather. The porcelain was his

ghost, the skeleton in the family closet passed down from one generation to the next.

As I have woven this story into my collages, the porcelain is neither an heirloom of

shame nor a badge of honor. A silly teapot survived to tell the story of an anti-Semitic

bureaucratic farce. But what truly endured was the Mendelssohns’ extraordinary works.

The Judenporzellan was not only the ghost in the Mendelssohn family closet, but also the

shame of King Frederick.

dR: We talked about the exilic, but what about the notion of the refugee?

IP: I grew up hearing stories of refugees and pioneers. My mother came from a very old

Jerusalemite family who became refugees in 1948 when they had to flee their home.

My father’s people chose to come to Palestine in the 1920s to build a new life away from

the shadow of Russian pogroms. I have a lot of empathy for all things that have to do with

exodus, refugees, and exile. I remember one distinct moment after my father passed away

when my mother and sister were organizing the family album. I asked my mother why

there was only one photo of her childhood. She explained that they had all been lost when

the family fled their burning home. Her story made an indelible impression, because it was

about things disappearing, and it was about the world of images.

dR: In your work, you explore the relationship between contemporary Israel and the plight

of the Palestinians.

IP: Yes, I have empathy for both. This is not a competition for who suffers most. It’s the

complex landscape I come from (see Ruthi Ofek essay on page 128).

dR: For the last two decades, you have been working on your extraordinary screen paintings

of carpets, Gardens for the Global City. What do you mean by “the global city” and how do

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these paintings represent that concept?

IP: The title came out of my friendship and conversations with Herbert Muschamp, who is

also the character in my sculpture Don Quijote Segunda Parte (1987; pages 186–89), a character

who becomes the reality of his own fiction, and for whom the distinction between reality and

illusion is an illusion to itself (see interview with Muschamp on page 204). Borges says that

“defeated by reality. . . he [Don Quixote] was survived only briefly by Miguel de Cervantes. . . . ” 5

dR: I recall that you were great friends even before he became the legendary New York Times

architecture critic.

IP: During our formative years, I made The Black Paintings and he was working on a book

called Narrative Architecture, which was never published (see Muschamp’s text on The Black

Paintings on page 210). We had many conversations about the meaning of narrative. I talked

about meta-narrative and how it was anchored in religious vocabulary. He was looking for

the vernacular in architectural theory. Once we were talking about the International Style,

and I told him that as a kid I thought International Style was a big world’s fair where every

country was represented and how years later I realized that International Style meant that

all modern cities around the world look the same. Herbert gave me the title Gardens for the

Global City. That series uses Asian Oriental carpet compositions to tell the story of Modernist

painting such as the New York School. There is no history of oil painting in the East as we

know it in the West. Their painting is in carpets and miniatures, and it was very interesting

for me to find a way to mix the two. Not unlike when I worked with Shahid.

dR: For me, the veil rooms stand out because of how you use metaphor and how you take the

viewer not to different places, but beyond.

IP: It was wonderful to learn from Shahid how his metaphors were not only magical but

verged on witchcraft: Love is not like fire. Love is fire. It will burn you. The frog becomes the

prince. There is a total transformation. In “Evening” (page 174), he actually has a magician

in the poem!

Some terrible magician, hidden behind curtains,

has hypnotized Time

so this evening is a net

in which the twilight is caught.

Now darkness will never come—

and there will never be morning.

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In my painting (2008; pages 176–85) I chose Venice as the arena of frozen time. A magician

on a gondola releases a black cloud of birds to usher in the night, to restart the cycle of

time. What could be a negative becomes optimistic.

dR: In The Dead Are Here (2009; pages 154–65), you go into an even more inventive direction.

IP: This painting is based on the lost love story of Laila and Majnoon, the Romeo and

Juliet of the East. They couldn’t marry because Majnoon didn’t come from the right family

and the loss sent him mad. Majnoon in Arabic means “crazy.” Traditional miniatures

depict Majnoon as only being able to communicate with animals. Laila is shown sitting

under a tree reading his letters. In my painting, the white pages of his letters morph into

tombstones, the arena for this unrequited love story. I took the model of Fragonard’s

Progress of Love, in which there is a garden where love progresses. I turned it into a cemetery

with cherry blossoms in full bloom, but where love does not progress.

dR: There is another kind of love and death in The Veil Suite (2007; pages 68–75).

IP: In Shahid’s last masterpiece, his requiem, “The Veiled Suite,” he depicts God as the

common lover who betrays you. God makes himself absent. He abandons you like all lovers

do. If there is one promise he keeps, it’s that he will kill you. But Shahid, the poet, has the

last word. He is dying, but he has not lost his spirit. Loss is the source of all great poetry.

dR: That’s what Lewis Hyde would call the gift.

IP: The gift he gave himself. In the end he prevails. Of course, leave it to Shahid to make the

connection between “veil” and “prevail.”

dR: Finally, one of the most interesting things in this exhibition is the way in which all the

painterly adaptations of poems and stories fit into a broader narrative. It’s like a group of

songs with a libretto. And all of a sudden there is an opera.

IP: I constructed the show in a thematic rather than chronological way. One work leads into

another emotionally. For example, in The Veil Suite, there is the image of the dead poet with

a black veil over his head and his black shadow below, rising on clouds of snow that evoke

the ascending Virgin. The poet is the only full-bodied character in the painting. All the

other characters are depicted as mere shadows, as if they are in the room with the viewer,

casting their shadows on the veil painting. Behind this veil, the next work is my white

porcelain Madonna holding the empty shroud or the vacant canvas. Who will be whose

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veil? Maybe the viewer becomes a veil blocking the scenery, maybe the ghost in it, maybe

the shadow?

dR: And that relationship becomes a meta-narrative of its own.

IP: Yes. The wandering veil.

N O T E S

1Jorge Luis Borges, Dreamtigers, trans. Mildred Boyer and Harold Morland (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 93.

2For generations Hebrew was mostly a sacred language used for prayer or study, until modern Hebrew was secularized by the Zionist enterprise and actualized as the daily spoken language of Israelis.—Ed.

3Gershom Scholem, “Pledge to Our Language, letter to Franz Rosenzweig,” in Udi Aloni, What Does a Jew Want? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 247.

4“Language is Name. In the name rests the power of Language, its abyss is sealed with the name. We have no right to conjure up the old names day after day without calling forth their hidden power. They will appear, since we have called upon them, and undoubtedly they will appear with vehemence!” Scholem, “Pledge to Our Language, letter to Franz Rosenzweig,” in Aloni, What Does a Jew Want?, 248.

5Borges, Dreamtigers, 42.

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Cinema and Duchamp changed

everything in painting. When I went to

school, Super-8 films, performance art,

and the documentation of performance

were a door out of the canvas ghetto.

That door was very seductive. Today

it’s video, but I’m still in love with the

promise of painting, and its object.

3 0

3 1

3 2

3 3

3 4

3 5

3 6

3 7

4 0

4 1

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